Last week’s Supreme Court’s decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shocked court observers for no less than three reasons. First, the court held that the law is constitutional. Second, it did so under Congress’s taxing authority, not its “Commerce Clause” power. And third, its opinion was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, who cast the deciding vote.
That third shocker is the one that may be the hardest to reconcile with expectations. Roberts is staunchly conservative and hardly considered a swing vote on most of the issues that come to the court.
He would hardly be expected to embrace legislation that its opponents consider a heinous over-reach by the government into the decisions of private individuals regarding how they provide for their own health care needs.
The rest of this column in available in this link to the Sacramento Bee, where it was originally published (Forum section, Sunday, July 1):
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/01/4600717/dramatic-court-ruling-alters-the.html).
Ed, your comments regarding the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act are well thought out and well written. But let’s look at the Big Picture.
Constitutional? Unconstitutional? I’ll leave that for you legal eagles to debate. All I know is it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to nullify the law on technical, legal issues. After all, the ACA prevents children from being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions, and prevents adults from dying due to lack of medical care because they’ve reached their insurance policy “lifetime maximums.” These and other provisions of the ACA are humane and common sense practices that any civilized society should applaud. If the Supreme Court’s refusal to strike down the ACA was judicial activism, then I say “Thank you” from the little people. Bush v Gore and Citizens United were both decisions that strongly favored the “haves” in this nation. It’s about time the “have nots” finally got a decision that goes their way.
For whatever reason, the Affordable Care Act must be allowed to proceed. It’s woefully inadequate in correcting the embarrassment of our current health care system where profits for insurance companies come first and the needs of millions of uninsured and under insured Americans take a back seat. But the ACA is a starting point. It can be built upon and hopefully in the future all Americans, rich and poor, will have access to adequate health care.
As far as the Supreme Court goes, I think it’s pretty much a joke. To say that they’re not a political body is to deny the ramifications of their recent decisions, especially Citizens United. The influence of unlimited money in the political process certainly biases everything henceforth in the favor of the “one percent.” I doubt the Founding Fathers had that in mind when they wrote the Constitution. The “American Dream” died the day that decision was issued. We are no longer a nation where every generation can expect to be better off than the previous generation. And that’s all because of the greed of the “one percent.”
The sorry fact is every ill this country is suffering can be traced back to the influence of money in our political system.
We can’t have a single-payer health care system because of the influence of insurance companies with executives reaping six-figure bonuses.
We can’t balance the budget or repair our crumbling infrastructure, and we lay off teachers and police officers because the wealthiest among us don’t want to pay higher taxes.
We poison the world we live in and cannot achieve energy independence because Big Oil has our legislators in their pockets.
We live today not wondering, “Could there be another financial meltdown?”, but wondering when the next one will happen. Wall Street is leading our politicians around by the nose when it comes to banking and finance regulation.
We fight wars based on bogus reasons because of the influence of the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower had it right). Fortunes are being made while our Best and Brightest are dying.
In short, millions of dollars are being handed out to both parties by special interest entities who are earning billions of dollars in return. All of that used to take place around the fringes of our “campaign finance laws” and in smoke filled rooms, and then the Supreme Court saw fit to make it all legal.
A hundred years from now when historians ponder what caused the United States of America to evolve from the most powerful nation in the world to a conflicted country torn apart by class struggle and revolution they will boil it down to two points – Greed and the Supreme Court.